Gabe Simon was already having a pretty good day on Sunday (May 3) when he found out that Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide, which he co-wrote and co-produced, had debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 all-genre chart dated May 9.
“I had a turkey leg in my left hand. I was at the [Tennessee] Renaissance [Festival]. My kids are running around dressed up as fairies, and I get a text from manager Drew [Simmons] saying that we’re No. 1,” he tells Billboard.
Kahan’s fourth full-length studio project is his first chart topper in the U.S., earning 389,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate. That makes the Mercury/Republic Records release the largest rock album since the Billboard 200 began measuring by units in late 2014. The title also landed the largest streaming week of any album so far in 2026 and had the biggest vinyl sales week for a rock album since Luminate began tracking sales in 1991. The album also had the largest streaming week of any album in 2026.
And the news got better. Monday (May 4), all 21 songs from the standard and deluxe version of The Great Divide appeared on the Hot 100, making Kahan only the sixth non-rap artist to chart 21 or more songs on the chart simultaneously.
Simon met Kahan through Simmons, who also manages Kahan, and began working with the folk rocker on 2022’s Stick Season, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and turned him into a star. Simon produced The Great Divide with Kahan and Aaron Dessner, The National guitarist and composer best known for his work with Taylor Swift, and co-wrote 10 of the 21 tracks.
Given The Great Divide’s often dark and occasionally vitriolic subject matter about relationships and the chasm that exists in communication, sometimes the mood during the album’s creation would be appropriately downcast.
“I couldn’t give you one particular vibe because it kept oscillating depending on where we were in the process,” Simon says. “Early on, it was angry and dark. I remember heading up to [Dessner’s] Long Pond [Studio in upstate New York] with Noah, and he goes, ‘I just want to write dark, angry sh-t.’ And I was just like, ‘Let’s do it.’ That’s when we did ‘Downfall’ and ‘Lighthouse’ and ‘A Few of Your Own,’ which is not sad or angry at all.”
But while recording and living at a farmhouse outside of Nashville, regardless of the sad content, the mood was upbeat. “We’re riding dirt bikes and shooting shotguns and we’re cooking our dinners for each other,” Simon continued. “We’re hanging out with cows and feeding chickens, fishing and just having fun.” Despite writing and recording such songs as the gaslight-fueled “Deny, Deny, Deny,” “we were just in a spot of contentment,” Simon says.
Over the last few years, Simon and Kahan have built up a circle of trust. “We have an unspoken language that really does something beautiful, and I love it,” Simon says. “I’m grateful for the trust, the companionship, that [Noah] lets me be critical of him and lets me push him,” Simon says. “I mean, that’s not the case with everybody, especially as they get bigger. In this moment right now, we’re seeing the fruits of that labor.”
Below, Simon takes Billboard behind the scenes of creating several songs on the album. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
“Doors,” No. 9 on Billboard Hot 100
I met [co-writer] Sam [Westhoff] through Noah Levine, Noah’s guitarist. They had written this amazing song together and I was like, “I need to meet this guy.” We hit it off. We want to see Noah play at the Hollywood Bowl and I introduced him to Noah, who said, “Hey, you want to write next week?” The nice thing about Noah is that we’ve been working together long enough that we have a trust of in our relationships, whether it’s for engineers, mixers or whatever. The very first day they wrote together, [they wrote] “Doors.”
No one’s such a prolific writer [as Noah]. He just comes in the room, and he just has this vision and you’re kind of following him and you’re trying to provide a vibe for him to be able to keep going and keep telling his story. When I got that song, we were like, “Holy s–t.” We had a whole other alternate ending to the song that he was playing live for a while. Then we were up in Vermont to wrap up the record and I’m like, “This song needs a badass guitar solo and a huge ending,” and I went in there and I played the first guitar solo I could think of. Last summer, I was at the Renaissance Fair and saw a guy playing the hurdy gurdy and I bought a hurdy gurdy. It took three months for them to build it. I flew it up to Vermont. We just started grinding on that hurdy gurdy for “Doors.” You can hear it throughout the whole song. It’s pretty sick.
“The Great Divide,” No. 11 (peaked at No. 6 in February)
We wrote that song this time almost two years ago. It was the first thing that we did, and Noah just needed this respite from his touring life. He was still kind of running the Stick Season gauntlet, He had just gotten this beautiful baritone rubber bridge guitar. It has this really thick tone. I wanted this lightweight thing next to it, which is that mandolin part. It just kind of fell together. Originally, it had this almost “Tusk”-like, beat to it. The song was about seven minutes long, which I was like, “There’s no way in the world, even for Noah, that anyone’s going to listen to this seven-minute-long song.”
We had to produce it over and over and over again: We did it once with his band, we did it once with some other folks, and then we did it once with the same crew and that was what worked because it’s when Noah played it live just on guitar. That whole vocal and guitar part is one take of him doing the whole song live. Every time we tried to put him on a mic and isolate everything, it didn’t feel human enough.
Because we knew “The Great Divide” wasn’t right the first 25-30 takes that he did of the song, we knew we had to keep going. When we finally landed on he needs to play it live with a guitar in his hand, that only took two takes … He never looks at lyrics. He’s just got everything in his brain and his memory. He’s able to, like, capture the feeling without having to be disengaged by a note or an iPhone. He’s just completely lost in the words.
“Porch Light,” No. 21(previously peaked at No. 20)
When Dylan [Jones] played that banjo part, I was like, “This is like a dance track.” We went from having this really cool folk song to our fists were in the air and we were jumping up and down in the studio because we had taken this really beautifully sad song about a mother and a son and we give it this context at the end. I hate leaving people in the gutter. I want to provide them even just one ring of hope. You get to the end of the song and you feel rewarded by this banjo part. And there’s a fiddle part that is this little bit of joy, a little bit of hope that kind knows it’s going to be okay.
I remember the first time I ever heard that song. [Noah] played this random thing with Ed Sheeran at Santa’s Pub in Nashville. I had heard an early [version], but I got cold chills when I heard the full thing. I looked over to Drew and I was like, “This song is unbelievable.” Ed Sheeran was speechless after he played [it]. It was such a cool moment.
“All Them Horses,” No. 45
It was crazy. We were [at the farm outside Nashville] when that [explosion] at the munitions factory about six miles away happened one morning. [The Oct. 10, 2025 series of explosions at the Accurate Energetic Systems factory killed 16 people and wounded seven.] Noah thought I had gotten up and was slamming the door of the house because we always complain about each other being too loud. I’m in bed, going “F–king Noah, slamming the door again.”
That spookiness was just like so eerie because someone had set off a C-4 [explosive] by accident inside of the factory. It was a tragedy, but we’re sitting there making these songs at the same exact time, not knowing any details other than we’re watching smoke go up in the distance. There was a fire tower on the property, so we climbed up to the top to look at what was going on and then we kept refreshing our news feed, hoping we could find out something. We heard all these police cars, ambulance and emergency vehicles going by. We had no idea what it was.”
“We Go Way Back,” No. 48
“We Go Way Back” is one of my favorite songs on the record because it’s one of the few love songs Noah’s ever written. It’ll probably be a slow burn for a lot of people. We wrote it two weeks right before he got married and he’d never spoken in that way before, and I’ve never seen that side of him. I’m a mushy guy, so that tune always kind of gets me in my feels and his little ending vocal lines that are just kind of dancing around each other.
It was a gentle, gentle, gentle production. It reminds me a bit more of how Stick Season was, maybe in “Forever,” because I wanted these really hollow sounding drums that were something we didn’t do anywhere else in the record. It ends up being a little sexy because of the way he rides his falsetto. But it’s meant to just be intimate in a whole different way on the record, and I’ve never heard Noah do that before.
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